Posts Tagged ‘hiring tools’

When you start up your own company, it seems like there is a never-ending parade of tasks competing for your attention. One of the most important things you need to take care of is making sure you have a good system in place for hiring new employees, as that will dictate the pace and psychology of your company moving forward.

Finding the right people for the right job is crucial, but it’s also very important that each person will be a good fit in your startup, culturally speaking, according to a recent post at The Next Web. Here are four key aspects of the hiring process that startups will want to take into consideration as they bring in more people:

1. Evaluate Outside of the Office Environment

Any experienced human resources professional can tell you that the credentials and skills listed in a resume will only tell you part of the story about your job applicants. You need to take the time to really get to know prospective employees, to truly gauge their capabilities.

One useful technique is to move your applicants from the office to see how they will react. For example, request a lunch meeting or ask applicants to go out and grab a drink. Putting them at ease in a more social situation can encourage applicants to speak more freely than if you were conducting their initial interviews in a stuffy conference room or your office.

2. Utilize Technology to Pick Your Needles in a Haystack

Your HR team is likely being inundated with applications from people who are eager to join your startup. What is the best way to determine who are the most promising candidates to bring in to speak with your team?

For example, if you are hiring a programmer, you can help narrow down the applicants with an online coding test. Similar tests exist for other job categories. The important point here is that once you get some initial results, you can follow up with phone conversations or bring them in immediately for further discussions.

In today’s hiring environment, utilizing applicant tracking software should also be able to narrow this task down. Although humans are great at many things such as communication and picking up on subtleties, software can definitly help a hiring manager’s job by sifting through data and bringing top talent to the foreground.

3. Get Everyone Involved in Finding Applicants

Make it clear to everyone in your company that they are involved in the process of finding applicants. Employee referral programs are an excellent first step. Your team members likely know qualified individuals who could make a real difference. In addition, a proper referral program will provide incentives to those referring team members which will make them feel involved in the entire hiring process.

Remember to also harness the power of social media when you have a need for job applicants. Potential employees may run across your startup via Facebook friends or by reading tweets from your employees. Of course, Linkedin is always a great source of hiring potential.

4. Make Sure Prospects Fit in Well in Your Culture

It’s crucial that you preserve your company’s culture, especially when you are still in the startup phase.

Even if applicants are a good fit on paper and meet all your technical requirements to do the job, you still need to make sure that they will get along with the other members of the team. A good way to get an indication about whether they are a good cultural fit is by letting them spend some time with your team during interviews and the evaluation process.

By getting your employees involved in finding potential job prospects and taking the time to get to know each applicant, you will be well on your way toward ensuring the future success of your startup.

No matter where they are in the world, hiring managers have a tough job finding good developers. In Silicon Valley the task is particularly difficult, given the fast-paced, competitive environment.

One of the biggest challenges is just finding top notch developers at the right price who aren’t already inundated with employment offers, and then setting up meetings to determine if they would work well in your team. After this, you have to verify that the developer can actually do a good job at the task at hand: coding. Recruiting developers like this can be an arduous task that can last several weeks for a hiring manager. And more often than not, just when it seems like you’ve found a great developer, you run into a snag and have to start the process all over.

This is where a new code editor called Codassium can make the hiring process much easier, as was recently reported on in TechCrunch. Codassium combines live video chatting with collaborative code editing.

Some developers are already accustomed to fielding requests to code on demand during the recruitment process. An interviewer might ask an applicant to code something to provide some new functionality to an existing project, for example, to see how well he or she understands the fine points. You might ask a developer how to improve something or to simply fix some broken code right in the office, evaluating performance under the fire of an intense interview.

The logistics of checking out a developer’s abilities can be a bit daunting. One way to go about it is to fly the developer right into your office. Many savvy recruiters go the route of using a video chat application alongside a collaborative editor, but this can be a messy process. Codassium simplifies the process by merging chat and collaborative editing in a single Web browser window.

Codassium has a fairly straightforward layout and is designed to be easy for people like hiring managers to use. You simply click a button to begin a chat and then enable your Web browser to access the feed from your webcam.

You then give the URL to the developer so you can make a connection. You can have multiple people participate in the video chat, which is useful when you want to get the opinion of one of your more talented programmers. Codassium enables syntax highlighting for the most-used languages, including C++, Objective-C, JavaScript and Python.

While new hiring processes like Codassium can make your job easier, not every hiring manager has the abilities to look along as people code while determining how “good” they are. This is why having an all around solid and effective hiring and recruiting process is a requisite to finding and attracting the best talent that is out there. Watching a developer code on the fly can be very useful to determine whether they are talented , however there are many other factors that go into deciding on whether they are truly a good hire.

Last week, Dice, the leading career site for technology and engineering professionals, rolled into the candidate sourcing tool market with Open Web, a recruiting tool that allows users to search approximately 50 social and professional networks and billions of web pages to create an aggregated or “super” profile of a candidate’s professional experience. Very similar to TalentBin and Entelo, Open Web from Dice allows recruiters to search for candidates with desired skills and experience across the web from one interface. The profile aggregation functionality pulls together the disparate pieces of information from across the web so recruiters can easily put together a meaningful story about candidates. “Open Web not only pulls in information about candidates’ professional experiences but also about their interests making it a valuable tool for collecting the underpinnings that contribute to assessing cultural fit,” said Jeff Winter, a professional recruiter and General Manager at technology search firm Gravity People in San Francisco.

Screenshot from Infoworld

Open Web is likely just the first roll for Dice. There are rumors that the tech job advertising leader is currently testing technology that will allow recruiting firms and employers to use the Open Web technology to update their candidate databases with the most current profiles of past job applicants. This could be another great tool for recruiters and employers that are constantly sourcing high-demand passive candidates. And, if that’s not enough, Dice promises to release a professional-facing tool that will enable tech professionals to view and interact with their Open Web profile as recruiters and employers see it.

The Hiring Sciences Hunch

Historically, Dice has been a strong player in the technology advertisement vertical. Their pricing has always been fair and their reputation is as good as, if not better, than any traditional job boards in the business. The release of Open Web starts the latest chapter for Dice, expanding their footprint into the white hot sourcing tools space. We don’t think Open Web is a big gamble. Dice has a unique advantage that can’t be overlooked. They’ve been active in the recruitment market for over 20 years. They understand their users and their buying trends. This is not just a group of smart engineers and fresh MBAs sitting around room guessing what recruiters do all day. These guys have seen the market evolve for 2 decades and they are jumping in the game with lots of chips.

Our hunch is that Dice with their significant customer base and brand recognition has a strong opportunity to run the table in the sourcing tools category. Their entry in this space will certainly create competition for smaller vendors with fewer offerings and little brand recognition. Open Web also gives recruiters a good alternative to LinkedIn which has created some negative equity recently with it’s aggressive sales tactics and high prices.

For more information about Open Web, contact dice: http://www.dice.com/

“Hiring managers visit many places in their search for candidates with the right skills and experience for their open positions. In today’s social grid, that’s a big dig – consuming a lot of time putting together disparate pieces of information from across the web,” said Scot Melland, Chairman, President and CEO of Dice Holdings, Inc. “Now, Open Web makes it easy by consolidating all kinds of valuable, public information about technology candidates in one place. In a few seconds, employers get unique profiles with real depth allowing both an understanding of the candidates’ qualifications and how to approach tech professionals on a more personal, direct level.

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